SVO

SVO is the basic pattern of many English sentences.

It stands for:

In this sentence structure the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third.

Linguists classify languages according to the type of sequence the elements in a sentence follow, and SVO is the second most common order found in the world, after SOV.

It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be naturally perceived by human psychology as a more intuitive order.

Arabic, Kashmiri, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Modern Hebrew, Khmer, Luganda, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, English, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, Latvian, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern.

SVO vs SOV

One of the most common mistakes Japanese learners of English make at the begininning is related to sentence structure.

This is because Japanese is an SOV language: the verb follows the object it acts upon. English on the other hand is an SVO language: the verb precedes the object it acts upon.

This is a very basic grammatical disparity between the two languages, so the type of mistakes shown above are very easy for native speakers of Japanese to make, and it can crop up in almost any transitive sentence.

Turkish, Tamil and Dutch are also SOV languages. Latin was (is) also a SOV language.